Wild Heart Art opening Saturday night

This week’s Home in the Heights column gave prominent play to this event Saturday night. And while the event itself is not in the Heights, just about everything about it is, so it gets in here. I hope you can make it to this event, because it looks like fun. Here’s an annotated version of the piece that appeared online Tuesday.

Culminating a year-long project, Wild Heart Art will host a reception and exhibit of Creative Process for the Wild Heart: An Intuitive and Collaborative Project at Winter Street Studios Gallery, 2101 Winter, from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Saturday.

The project, the brainchild of Wild Heart founder Kay Kemp, involved 14 artists throughout the country in a year-long collaborative art journal project.

Each artist created their own book, established a theme and sent their book on a year-long rotation throughout the country returning to the artist a year later with contributions from the 13 other participating artists. Each artist’s contribution was fueled by the theme of the visiting book.

Cherie Ray, one of the three Heights residents involved in the project, said the experience was transformative.

“I’m not an artist who has ever produced art professionally,” she said. “So with a process work like this, once you get past the fear of the blank page it’s wonderful where you go. It’s just amazing when we don’t do what our mind tells us. It can be a really exciting thing to live in the world.”

(One aside here, my wife Theresa Gregory is an artist and has spoken to me repeatedly on this very topic. All artmaking is a process, and focusing on that aspect highlights the Zen aspect of the entire creative experience. I’m sure just about every artist would say the same.)

Ray, who teaches process art with Kemp at Wild Heart, 909 Harvard, said that having a final piece of work produced from 14 different artists was frightening at first, but she pointed out that surrendering to the process of creation in that fear was the whole point of the project.

“Processing is when you get in touch with you own creative rhythms, sit down and move past the notion of producing a piece of art, just sitting down and being creative with no goal in mind. It frees you up to just relax and get into a creative space. The mind has its own opinions of what it looks like, but you have to go through that and let the artwork take its own shape and form. Rarely does process art match the mind’s image of what’s about to be produced,” she said.

“You sit down and some level, some part of you knows exactly what needs to happen. You get the mind out of the way for it to unfold. Then you look and say `Holy cow! Who did this come from?’ You feel like you’re kind of a vessel for what passes through.”

She said that seeing another book arrive in the mail was a thrilling experience.

“Everybody in this process got so excited when they got home and the box was at their door. The whole anticipation of opening it. Very tactile. A lot of people decorated the box or included a little gift. It comes to you and you sit with it,” Ray said.

“Even owning your own book, there were a couple of times during the year where you might crisscross with your book. When you first get the book, no one else’s artwork is in it. But towards the end, you have to listen to your own voice. The idea of process, it continues to take on a deeper dimension every time you get a new book. You get more fuel for the engines.”

Ray, Kemp and Sharon Bartlett are the three Heights area artists participating in the project. Other artists are Mary Ann Fields and Christi Hellrung, both from the Montrose area, Barb Heffron from Rice Village, Wendy Campbell from the Medical Center, Hui-Lin Shieh from Kingwood, Anne Taylor from Memorial, Susan Lynch and Linda Ercole-Musso from Galveston, Tiffani Ayres from Los Angeles, Nancy Raper from Spencer, Ind. and Diane Miller from Fort Collins, Colo.

Ray said that 13 of them shared one thing in common — none had made art their living.

“Kay is the only professional artist in all of this. We had all taken classes at Wild Heart Art but this was just her brainstorm that took flight on its own,” she said. “It all scared most of us half to death but it gets us in a creative space and gives us a deadline. We all receive a theme. You kind of set the intention as you do process art. You have no idea what’s going to go into there, and then you see what shows up and put it in the book. It’s been an amazing process. You get 13 or 14 interpretations of one theme per work.”

For more information on this project or Wild Heart Art, check out www.wildheartart.com or call 832-618-1416.